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FAQ
Back to TerraGenesis_Game_Wiki Answers to questions that get asked a lot. I found a bug, or I have a suggsion what should I do The developer is actually very active on Facebook, go to the TerraGenesis FB page; there is a Bug discovery form and if you read the threads you will sooner or later encounter a Developer. how can I stop planet going to hell over night? You can pause the game; click on the “world” icon in the top right of the screen to get back to the planet control screen; then click on the little gear icon in the top left. a pop up window has the option to pause. By the way in the world control screen there are icons at the bottom right which have some cool planet viewing options. WHY does my hab dome that can exit under several million pa of atmospheric pressure crumble at the first sign of being submerged under water. here is the answer from the game developer as per posted to the Facebook group: It's been asked a few times before, but I've never taken the time to work up a comprehensive answer. :) So here was my thinking when I was making the game. The game design answer: It's a game mechanic to make people take their sea levels seriously, and it fits the player's expectation of rising sea levels being a threat to any pre-existing infrastructure. The in-game answer: Water is RADICALLY higher pressure than air. In TerraGenesis terms, you're talking about 100,000 Pa for every 10 meters of depth. That's INSANE. At 6km deep (the ideal sea level for Mars), we're talking about pressures up to 60,000,000 Pa, or about 6.5x the starting pressure of Venus. This is calculated in Earth gravity, of course, but the point remains: when you start going underwater, you take on very high levels of pressure REALLY fast. And a dome designed for a vacuum would be even worse off, not better: designing to "hold air in" is very different from designing to "hold water out," which requires a completely different set of design principles and architectural supports. The swings in air pressure that are possible in TerraGenesis are already straining credulity, the idea that a Hab designed for space could survive deep-sea pressures is just too much. Adding to that, water (especially salt water) is also HIGHLY corrosive, and can damage electrical equipment and even plain old steel structures in surprisingly short time. That's why metal bridges like the Golden Gate Bridge are always painted: it's not an aesthetic choice, it's a protection against corrosion. Even if a Hab could support the weight at first, it's just a matter of time before everything starts being eaten away. There's also heat to consider. Buildings and vehicles in space have very complex systems for retaining heat when necessary, and dumping it when not. Everything electronic produces heat (to say nothing of heavy industry), and it's not good enough just to wait for a hot object to cool off in space because the lack of air makes heat dissipation VERY slow. That's one reason the Space Shuttle always had its bay open while in space: it was venting heat. On the other hand, anyone who's gotten wet on a cold day knows how fast water can rip the heat out of you when you need it. Any Hab designed for an air or vacuum environment would face disaster if its thermal systems were suddenly submerged in water. And that's to say nothing of purely infrastructural requirements. A submarine is a very different system from a spaceship, and the city-sized equivalent would be even more so. How many water-removal pumps do your Martian colonists have lying around? How many submersible vessels for voyaging out the door? It'll be a long time before we have vehicles that can go from space straight down into deep water, so do you have a floating platform for rockets to land on before their cargo is taken beneath the waves? Did your colony rely on sunlight for anything, from solar power to crop growth, because that's not an option anymore. And airlocks for undersea and vacuum environments are very different systems: as soon as your dome is flooded, all you can do is hope that someone has time to replace the front door before everyone inside starves, and that they can do it without flooding the whole dome in the process! In summary: Its entirely possible to design a dome for an underwater environment, and it's something I've considered adding to TerraGenesis in a future update, but even if I do it'll be an entirely new facility you'd have to build. The sheer number of ways that an undersea colony would have to differ from an extraterrestrial surface colony could fill an engineering textbook.